Family Tree
by TheUSofCalzona
Summary: Callie leaves Arizona to go into therapy alone. This is the result.


Arizona sat on the slightly lumpy couch in the therapists office for nearly a half hour before she finally spoke. She was so shell shocked by Callie showing up and then leaving again that she was on auto pilot, causing her to go in when her name was called even if she hadn't wanted to be locked in a room with someone paid to read people and unlock their secrets. She hated the idea of therapy but that's what you did in situations like this right? When you loved someone but hurt them and broke their trust in way that you can't mend on your own you went to therapy right?

"When my father is asked what he does he says he's a Marine. And the way he says it shows you all you need to know about him. He says it like it needs no introduction or explanation, like it needs nothing more added to finish off who he is. He's a Marine and his father was a Marine and his son and his daughter weren't. And I still think that was the greatest disappointment in his life. Tim joining the Army Rangers was great and all, but it wasn't Tim being a Marine, not good enough in my father's eyes. " Arizona said, having opened her mouth to tell a joke about her father and instead something very different and unfiltered poured out. Still, she felt unable to stop herself now after so long of holding these thoughts back. "He was the towering figure of my childhood. For the first 18 years I took breath into my lungs, he stood over me, pushing me to do better, be stronger, think quicker. Got a B+ on a paper, why not an A-, got an A- on a paper why not an A? Second place was never an option for his children no matter how much it took out of us to constantly be fighting for first." She sighed not looking over at the woman sitting behind the desk. She just wrapped her arms around her waist and tried to keep herself protected like she had to do all of her life.

"He hadn't cared that my wrist had been broken during the softball championships the year we were in San Diego. It didn't matter that anytime a ball hit my bat my wrist felt like it was breaking all over again. It hadn't mattered that I got a double in my last at bat because we needed a home run and I didn't get it. I let him down by not hitting a home run, I let him down and I had to pay for that. So he reminded me every day for the next year how I failed him. He reminded me how I dropped my back shoulder and didn't use my legs. He reminded me I wasn't good enough to earn his love. My father never hit me, never laid a hand on me, no he used words to inflict all the damage he could. Yet somehow I always felt like it was all worth it in the rare moments when I met his high standards. When I finally did it just right, just the way he wanted it. It was the burning pride in my chest when his massive hand slapped me on the back and he grinned at me and told me that I sailed over the bar." She could remember the day she told her parents that she got into medical school, the day that he told her he was proud of her for the first time that she can clearly remember. Yes, she wasn't going to be a marine and that disappointed him, but she was going to do something meaningful. Her career,her life, would be one that , mattered. That feeling of finally being good enough for her father's love was more than she could take. She cried for two days after out of a mix of joy and relief that always made her question if she was doing this for herself or for him. The only time his reaction ever truly surprised her is when she came out. He had been the kind of dad that she dreamed of for these few days, the kind of dad she wished all kids who came out could have, and it made up for so much else.

"My mother never held a job outside of the home in her life, nice girls just didn't do that back then unless they had to. She married my father the day after her eighteenth birthday. She married a man in a uniform with blue eyes that she said made her feel like a woman when she felt so much like a girl, that's what she would always say when I asked why she married him." She paused, trying to gather up the thoughts swirling in her head so she could go on. She wasn't Callie, she didn't like rambling to vent her emotions, even if on occasion she had been known to 'speechify' according to her wife. "My mother was also the homemaker and supporter for her family in every sense of the word. She cooked every meal for my father, cleaned his house, carried his children. She made sure that every social function that might help him get that promotion up the ranks of the Marines a day or a week faster was attended. And she cheated on him every time he deployed." Arizona said bluntly, pausing to think about why she wore a red dress today, why she felt the need to look good for Callie today of all days.

"When my father would leave for his deployments she would cry for three days. For three days Tim and I were on our own or we would go to our friend's houses to make sure we didn't get in her way. And then it would stop. Just like that. She's bottle it all up and she would move on with her life. She would bake Tim and me cookies and she would make sure to attend everything and anything at school. She was always so put together too, always so beautiful. But Tim and I knew why she looked like that, why she tried so hard, she was sleeping with other men when my father was gone. She would put us to bed and then leave for the night, coming back just before she had to get us up for school and pretend like nothing happened. It would go on for as long as my father was gone, and then the day that he would come back she would always get her hair cut like he liked, put on a red dress, and meet him for dinner. The affairs stopped about 15 years ago when he stopped being deployed and got more of a desk job. Just like that, they stopped." She said in an almost confused tone. She'd never quite understood that, how her mother could do something for years and then at the drop of a hat just…stop.

She looked down at her red dress and tried not to cringe at the unsettling thoughts that swirled in her mind. She had tried to be like her mother, tried to put on a red dress and look her best and go to her spouse for forgiveness. True it wasn't quite the same since her father never knew about the affairs, at least as far as she knew, whereas Callie did know about her transgression, but still…The parallel was all too uncanny. Funnily enough Callie knew about her mother and father's relationship, at least in part, she told her one night after drinking a few too many glasses of wine when it was a little too close to Tim's birthday. She talked about how she always thought the affairs balanced out the loneliness of her father being away for her mother, and Callie held her as cried silent tears. Though weren't her tears always silent? H She remembered telling Callie how she never wanted to be so lonely and scared and unkind as to do that to her partner.

"When I was in the woods I thought a lot about my brother and how he must have felt when he was laying in the sand dying. He died because there wasn't enough doctors in the war zone to save him. He died because he bled out waiting for doctors to save him and there I was with nothing but doctors around close to bleeding out and going into shock too. The idea of it felt so ironic that I nearly took a rock and bashed my own head in from it." She admitted for the first time that she had wanted to die during her time in the woods, even if she tried to repress and compartmentalize those thoughts. "I wanted to die so I wouldn't come back home and be someone my wife wouldn't love and someone my daughter wouldn't want as a mother. But I couldn't die in the woods because Mark was going to and I couldn't let Callie loose both of us. I knew he was going to die because he lost Lexie and Lexie was his heart. You can't live without your heart, even people who don't go to medical school know that." She muttered as she sat back in the chair, trying to put all these thoughts and feelings together in her head and not sound like a raving lunatic.

"Dr. Robbins, Arizona, I know you are in pain but getting help doesn't make you weak. You're not your father or your mother, you're you. And you can get better. But you need to do it because you want to get better and not because you want your wife back or you want to be a good enough mother. You have to want it for yourself." The therapist finally spoke, having taken in a half hour of watching a shell shocked Arizona sit there and then another half hour of Arizona spilling out details of her life like she had never before.

"I need to do this for me. I don't want to feel like I'm still on that mountain anymore." Arizona whispered, closing her eyes and trying not to vomit up lunch. Looking down at her hands she tried to control her breathing while tears, still as silent as ever, fell down her cheeks.

Not too much more is said after that, and after making another appointment, Arizona walked back into the lobby only to see Sofia asleep in Callie's arms. She walked over to them quickly, trying to wipe her tears away so Sofia wouldn't see them if she woke up. She hated for her little girl to see her cry and to see her weak, just like she hated for Callie to see those things. Damn her father. Maybe if she'd just let Callie see her, really see her and how she felt after the crash…But if wishes were horses every man would ride one.

"What's going on? If she ok?" She asked anxiously, both the doctor and the mother freaking out at Sofia's unexpected appearance with her estranged wife. Estranged…just thinking that made her heart hurt.

"You need her tonight more than I do. I wanted you to be able to have someone to hold and it can't be me yet." Callie whispered, giving their daughter over to Arizona. She knew that if Arizona went in to the session she was going to break. She had been too close to the edge for so long that it was just inevitable. "Good night Arizona." She whispered, leaning forward to kiss her daughter's and then Arizona's cheek.

Arizona stood there, a sleeping toddler in her arms, and watched her wife walk out of the waiting room for the second time that night. This time though she felt hope start to well up inside her and before she knew it she was smiling. Callie might not have come in with her or let her explain what happened or why she did it, but she cared enough to bring Sofia here and to let her have her tonight. She care enough to still want her to be ok. And she kissed her cheek. It might not be much but right now it was one small step in the right direction. Right now that kiss on the cheek may as well have been a full blown make out for all the butterflies it caused in her belly.


End file.
